Not metaphorically.
Not writer’s block.
Absolutely physically lost.
For the past 75 pages (or two days in the characters lives)
the story has moved along so well that I got
lost in an extremely remote part of the country. Characters kept moving,
but I forgot to pay attention how far. Which has left me with the dilemma that
before the characters can progress on their journey, I have to find out where
they were so I can move them to where they need to be.
What this means is readers know exactly how far characters
can travel in a day, either by air, car, bicycle, walking or crawling. So if
the characters are driving for two days straight they better make it further
than Dallas to Waco.
Lesson here is: 1) Never take me hiking as your guide in the
backcountry, and 2) if you’re a writer keep very accurate side notes exactly
where your characters are every minute, especially if the entire book is about
a journey. Your job as a writer is to keep track of every aspect from color of characters’
socks to what they ate for lunch. Unless you have an eidetic memory it’s
impossible to store and recall instantly all that information.
Now where did I put the map?
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